


a house on the rock.

by outpastthemoat



Series: song of songs [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, sentimental drivel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-02
Updated: 2015-02-02
Packaged: 2018-03-10 05:51:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3279125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s feeling lightheaded when he finally pulls up and parks beside the bunker, but there’s no one to come outside and open the driver’s side door and help Dean step out, there’s no one to take Dean’s bags out of the trunk and carry them to the bunker.  There’s no one to ask for help and anyway he’s fine, always has been, so he just leans his forehead against the steering wheel and lets his head hang between his legs for a while until the feeling passes.  Then he hauls himself out of the car and drags his his bags inside even though even the fingers on his good hand are trembling and his legs are shaking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a house on the rock.

It’s the strangest feeling.  Dean is watching his own blood pumping out of his body and it feels so strange.   He’s forgotten how empty it makes you feel, watching all your blood dripping out of you.  He’s watching blood spread across the shoulder of his jacket and he’s seeing the streaks of dirt across the fabric and it’s the strangest thing: he’s thinking about holding a fistful of dirt at his mother’s grave.  

She didn’t get a funeral: there wasn’t enough of her left to mourn, but they had put up a headstone and dug a hole and closed what was left of his mother’s remains inside of a coffin and Dean had stood there watching his father’s still face, holding his dirt.  He had already known what happens when you lay someone in the ground.  He’d wanted to be prepared.  So he crept away early that morning and he’d dug up a jarful of dirt from the backyard of his home.  

Dean is not dying, but he feels like he is. He leans against a gravestone in a cemetery far from his home and he takes off his top layer of shirt and wraps it around his shoulder and upper arm.  He pulls himself together long enough to grab the shovel and his lighter and his sawed-off shotgun and he drags himself to his car and the whole time he’s thinking about that dirt, how it had small bits of crystal shards and flecks of mica, how he’d dug up the dirt from a corner of their backyard by the oak tree, he’d wanted that to be the dirt to give his mother.  He’d wanted it to be something more familiar than the strange dirt in his father’s hand.  He’d wanted it to remind her of home.

—

The bleeding’s stopped for now, so Dean wraps his right arm in an old flannel shirt left in the Impala’s trunk, keeping it tucked close against his side, and uses his left hand to unload his guns and stow them in the trunk, keeps his left hand on the steering wheel even though it feels awkward and unnatural.  With his right hand on the wheel he can keep on for hours without stopping, he’s used to it, his fingers know just how to slide across the wheel to flick the radio on or light a cigarette or grab a cassette.  With his left, well. He can drive.

He’s feeling lightheaded when he finally pulls up and parks beside the bunker, but there’s no one to come outside and open the driver’s side door and help Dean step out, there’s no one to take Dean’s bags out of the trunk and carry them to the bunker.  There’s no one to ask for help and anyway he’s fine, always has been, so he just leans his forehead against the steering wheel and lets his head hang between his legs for a while until the feeling passes.  Then he hauls himself out of the car and drags his his bags inside even though even the fingers on his good hand are trembling and his legs are shaking.  

He leaves the shovel in the backseat, leaves mud and graveyard dirt and bloodstains on the upholstery, he leaves his knives bloody and unclean.  

He unlocks the door and flips on the lights and drags himself down the hall to his room.  Dean hasn’t been spending much time here lately.  That’s why there’s no food in the kitchen, that must be why the bunker smells like dust and mildew.  He’s been throwing his clothes in piles on the floor, piles of jeans and shirts with bloody rips and tears, piles of slightly cleaner stuff.  He doesn’t want to be here.  It’s starting to show.  There are water stains patterning the tops of all the tables, there are dark shadowy spots where the light bulbs have burned out and he hasn’t bothered to replace them.  

He doesn’t bother going into the kitchen and checking the fridge, because he already knows it’s empty; if he wants something to eat, he’ll have to get back in the car and drive down to the nearest Gas ‘N Sip. If he needs antiseptic or medical tape or bandages he’ll have to find the nearest pharmacy. 

He doesn’t call Sam.  He doesn’t call Cas.  He wipes the worst of the blood off his jacket and thinks, I’ve got this. I’m fine. Dean knows how to work alone.  He can carry himself through anything. Dean can take care of himself.  It’s safer that way, he tells himself, and sometimes he even believes it.  

This is not one of those nights.  But there is no one to turn to, so Dean sits down on his bed and his right arm hurts to move so he uses his left hand to ease out of his shirt, manages to pop the button on his jeans single-handedly, peels off his boots and he’s so tired he doesn’t bother pulling back the sheets before curling around his injured arm and passing the fuck out.  

—

When he dreams, he dreams of houses.  

When Dean was a kid, he used to build houses out of rocks.  He’d outline all the rooms, marking off the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom with smooth river stones and chunks of raw gravel and the dirt-stained crystal hunks he’d pick up sometimes in parking lots.  He’d build houses out of stone instead of Lincoln Logs, pile them up and balance leaves on his little rock mounds to serve as roofs, and he’d go so small and still and tiny that he could crawl inside his rock houses and live there, all alone.

Dean has been thinking about houses, lately.  He drives around in nice neighborhoods, not cruising for anything except open houses, houses with for sale signs in the front yard.  He’ll stop at them and try his luck and sometimes the handle of the doorknob will turn underneath his hand and he’ll step inside and he’ll play pretend, imagining that this is his house.  His walls, his windows, his plaster ceiling crumbling on the steam-cleaned carpet.

He will walk through the quiet, empty houses and he will make sure to step only on the plastic pads that trail through the rooms so that the dirt on his shoes doesn’t stain the beige Berber carpet.  He will stand in the kitchen and look out at the backyard and he will measure the master bedroom to figure out if it could fit a king-sized bed.  He will take the flyers from the mailboxes before he drives away, but he always throws them away before he gets home.

Used to be, Dean knew what home meant.  Now he’s not so sure.  It used to be a feeling, something that would hit him in the times when he was glancing across the dash and seeing his brother riding shotgun, used to be the kind of feeling he’d get when they’d close the door of their motel room for the night, with lines of salt across the doors and his pistol under his bed.  Dean used to feel at home and settled in a car with his family.  Now he sits in the Impala and glances around and the passenger seat is empty and it doesn’t feel like home anymore.

—

He wakes up once or twice. He keeps thinking he’s hearing footsteps just outside his door or low voices talking in the hall, but each time he opens his eyes and pulls himself upright and staggers out of bed towards the door and flings it opens, there’s no one there.

He even walks down the hall a little ways, not all the way to the front door but close. He stops and listens. There’s no one here but him. Dean tells himself he’d already known. He tells himself he isn’t surprised. He tells himself that he’s fine, he doesn’t need anybody, that he’ll be all right. But when he goes back to his room, he leaves the door open. Just to be able to hear a little better. Just in case.

—

Dean is dreaming that his phone is ringing.  He knows he is dreaming because when he answers, it is Castiel’s voice on the line.  I need you, he keeps saying into his phone, but it just keeps going to voicemail.  Cas, if you can hear me, he keeps saying, please.  I need you.  Please.

Castiel doesn’t hang around.  He never stays the night.  He never stays for dinner, coffee, for those lingering unfinished conversations that Dean’s always sort of hoping for whenever Castiel is around.  Castiel is there and then he’s gone.  

“Don’t let it hit you,” Dean had said to him, once.

“Don’t let what hit me?” Castiel asked.

He meant to say, The door, on your way out.  Because you’re always leaving, man, and I don’t know why, but it hurts.   But he doesn’t.  Instead he just replied, “Stay safe, man.”  Castiel isn’t going to make a home out of this place, he already knows.  He can tell by the way Castiel’s fingers will close around his car keys, letting them jingle in the palm of his hand.  Dean never asks Castiel to stay.  He doesn’t even try.

Come home sometime, he wants to say, but how is it fair to call this Cas’s home when it’s not even Dean’s own?

Sometimes when he talks to himself at night he’ll admit it’s hard, going it alone.  But you can’t make homes out of people, though Dean’s tried.  He’d used to dream about having a home of his own.  Some place to come home to.  Now he comes home, and even though his bed is there and his clothes are in his closet and his food is in his kitchen, it’s not the same feeling.

—

Sometimes Dean picks up rocks, sticks them in his pockets. Sometimes he forgets and brings them home, sometimes they fall out of his clothes when he unpacks his duffle bags. Sometimes he leaves them on the shelf over his bed or his desk. He wakes up once, just to stare at the rocks on the edge of his desk. He is trying to put his finger on why they are there, why they are important. He thinks they have something to do with being home. 

Dean is dreaming about the look on his father’s face at his mother’s grave.  He is dreaming about the way the pastor had leaned in close to his wife and murmured, Mary was his rock.  And after that, Dean had to be a rock too.  

Dean, his father had said once, you’re a brick, and Dean had known that this was important, that this meant that someone would hold onto you for balance, when you are the frame and foundation of someone else’s house.  

—

Dean is dreaming and in this dream, he is not alone.  

In this dream, Castiel is here.  

“You came,” Dean says.  

“You needed me,” Castiel says, and Dean can’t stop it, he feels tears in the corners of his eyes.

"How’d you know?" he asks, and Castiel doesn’t answer.  He just reaches in the space between them and smooths his fingers across Dean’s cheek.  He is sitting on the edge of Dean’s bed, leaning over to touch Dean’s face, and when Dean looks at the shadows on the wall behind him he can see the outline of a mountain in the angle of his shoulders.

Castiel helps him sit up and brings Dean a glass of water and a handful of pain pills and goes on sitting there next to him while Dean drinks it, his hand almost but not quite curling around Dean’s elbow.

Dean drains the glass.  He looks at Castiel and asks, “Can you stay with me?  Just for a while?” His voice is hoarse.  He thinks he might be begging, but he doesn’t care, because Castiel takes the empty glass out of his hands and sets it down and wraps his hands around Dean’s arms.

“I’m here,” Castiel is saying.  It warms Dean up from his head down to his toes.   It’s like blue skies coming out after a long night of rain.  Dean wants to bask in it, warm himself with it, lie in those words like a patch of sunlight on the floor. 

Dean puts his good arm around Castiel’s shoulders and leans into him.  He puts his nose right at the collar of Castiel’s shirt and takes a few good steady breaths of him, of Castiel, with his steady shoulders, who doesn’t even flinch at the weight of all of Dean on him.

Dean has fought all his life to be strong enough, to be take to take the hits, roll with the punches, to take it.  He has never been strong enough.  But he can’t make it alone.  He can’t.  He’s tried, before; he’s failed a thousand times over. 

He doesn’t want to be a rock anymore.   He wants to let the world rest on someone else’s shoulders.

Dean looks at Castiel and he can see something warm behind those clear, wet eyes, instead of seeing a being made of stardust and granite and marble, something as hard as stone, something to rail against, Dean is seeing someone he could lean on. Someone who could take all his stupid, stupid shit and never break under the weight of it.  Castiel is five stratums of weird and earnest and gentle, cunning and kindness, he has been weathered and chipped away and built back up again like layers of sedimentary rock, and Dean has been building a home out of that rock for years now.  That must be why it hurts so badly when Castiel is not here.  He has become Dean’s rock.

“I can’t do this without you,” he says, and Castiel takes it like a rock.  He just places his hand on the back of Dean’s head and says very quietly, “That’s why I’m here.”

He leans against Castiel’s chest and feels the sturdy frame underneath, the heartbeat under his skin.  You could build a house out of him.  You could build walls out of his hands, you could put in windows where his eyes are.  Dean could live inside him, tucked away near his heart.  Dean could make a home out of him, and oh, he wants to, he wants to take a hammer to his ribs and knock down the walls around his heart, he wants to break the glass inside him, he wants to burn his old house to the ground and make something new and holy out of the ashes.  Dean wants to build a house, he wants to build it right in Castiel’s arms, from the bones of his body, the flesh of his skin, the curve of his cheek; Dean wants to built a home out of him and fill it with his eyes, his lips, the pulse of Castiel’s blood under his mouth.  He wants to go on building a house made up of Castiel’s rock, and maybe he when he’s finished there’ll be traces of Castiel in every brick, every tile, every soft pine floorboard; maybe even the dust under the bed will be Castiel, too, and Dean will sigh and close his eyes and think, This is home.

“I’m here,” Castiel says again and again. “I’m here.”

He turns his head and places his cheek on Castiel’s shoulder, feeling the stiff fabric of Castiel’s dress shirt against his skin, thinking how nice it is to have him here.  Feeling Castiel’s arms slowly come up and closing around him.  How good it is to be home.  

—

> “And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.”  - Matthew 7:25


End file.
